Flickr Photostream

Blogroll

Tag: h2h

Over the past week or so, I’ve found that one of my other websites, H2H Security Group, has been getting a lot of spam. Unfortunately, it’s not just the random ads from bots. Bots I can deal with, and it’s unlikely that they’ll ever get past registration because there’s a reCAPTCHA in the registration. No, I have to deal with credit card spam.

Most people I know get spam in their email; it happens to almost all of us if we have a presence on the web with that email address. If any of you have read the spam before, usually it’s just a random string of words with a few links in them. Heck, some of them are just downright amusing. But credit card spam is more of a problem; not only is a nuisance, but it’s highly illegal. Not something that you want on a legitimate website.

The first problem was determining if the spam was automated (ie. from a bot), or a person who was posting the spam. The easiest way to do this was to install the reCAPTCHA system as I mentioned above. If you’ve signed up for any major service recently, chances are you’ve encountered a CAPTCHA of some sort. CAPTCHAs are the images with random numbers and letters which is supposed to be hard to read by an automated system, but fairly easy for a human. They are specifically designed to prevent bots from accessing the system. Although the reCAPTCHA system I installed stopped some of the spam, it didn’t stop all of it.

Stopping spam requires ruling your web site with an iron fist. Some automated scripts will help minimize it, but on a long enough timeline, spam will get through. It’s bound to happen. Currently the only way I’ve found to stop the spam is to start blocking IP addresses. In the case of this incident, I was forced to block an entire subnet of IP addresses. I found that ISP in Vietnam was producing a lot of the spam that I received. Despite numerous emails to their abuse department I found out that they deleted the emails without reading them, and made the decision to block the entire ISP from my web site.

Doing so is a bit of a double-edged knife. On one hand, the spam has stopped since I’ve done this (although I only did this two days ago – let’s see what happens!). On the other hand, I have pretty much cut off an entire country from visiting my site. Granted, the primary language there is not my primary target for my site, but still has the problem of cutting off legitimate users.

Of course, this is not a foolproof solution. There’s no reason that a person on that ISP couldn’t use a proxy to access my site and post more spam, but I’m taking a proactive approach to preventing this spam, and that’s about all one can do. Perhaps an interesting project would be to keep a central repository of known spamming IP addresses so that those IPs could be blocked by many websites around the world, and not just by a single server. Allowing a group of servers who pick up spam regularly to add IPs to the list for a number of days, and then many servers could download a list. It’s maybe something to consider to stop the spread of spam across the world.